The amount of digital data and content which people generate and store has been increasing at a very large pace. It is believed that this trend will continue and will drive the need for reliable, large capacity, low power, and low cost storage media. Current technology, including Hard Disk Drives (HDD) and Flash memory have done very well in meeting this growing demand. However scaling and technological advances are becoming progressively more difficult and both technologies may face severe roadblocks in the future. Thus, many companies and research entities are constantly looking for an alternative storage technology that could be used in a large number of consumer electronics applications.
One type of emerging memory that could potentially address these and other pending issues is resistive nonvolatile memory. Resistive memory operates based upon the reversible and reproducible switching of a resistive storage element between a low resistance state (LRS) and a high resistance state (HRS). This effect can be used to implement a memory element where the LRS and HRS can correspond to binary logic states, e.g. “0” and “1.”